Some conventional telephone sets with an answering function include an information transfer function of recording an incoming call upon reception of the call in user absence and transferring the recorded contents to a portable terminal or the like on the road. With the recent advances in the performance of fixed telephone sets for home use, a terminal which can transmit/receive e-mail as well as performing voice communication and facsimile transmission/reception has become available. As a consequence, the number of types of data which can be handled by fixed telephone sets has increased.
A conventional technique directed to facilitate using both an answering service and a mail service is disclosed in, for example, patent reference (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-331417). The technique disclosed in patent reference is associated with a mail conversion system which can store e-mail as voice data in a message box upon voice conversion or can freely exchange voice messages and e-mail by transmitting recorded voices as e-mail upon document conversion.
According to the prior art described above, an automatically recorded message is handled as voice data, and e-mail is handled as text data. Although there have been some systems which can convert an automatically recorded message into text data upon document conversion or can convert e-mail into voice data upon voice conversion, there have been no systems which can transfer the two types of data to a portable terminal or the like on the road by one communication.